Alabama Noir

About the Contributors

Ace Atkins was born in Troy, Alabama, in 1970 and attended high school and college in Auburn, where he played football. Atkins has been nominated for every major award in crime fiction, including the Edgar three times. He has written nine books in the Quinn Colson series and continued Robert B. Parker’s iconic Spenser character after Parker’s death in 2010, adding seven best-selling novels in that series. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his family.

Marlin Barton lives in Montgomery. He has published three story collections: Pasture Art, Dancing by the River, and The Dry Well; and two novels: The Cross Garden and A Broken Thing. His stories have appeared in Prize Stories 1994: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories 2010. He teaches in a program for juvenile offenders called Writing Our Stories, and he also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Converse College.

D. Winston Brown was born at Holy Family Community Hospital in Ensley, Alabama, a neighborhood on the west side of Birmingham, and he grew up in nearby Bush Hills. He went on to graduate from Ramsay High School, and later from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has published both fiction and creative nonfiction. He now works in Florence, Alabama, but still lives and writes in Birmingham.

Kirk Curnutt was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1964 but has lived in Montgomery, Alabama — the hometown of Zelda Fitzgerald — since 1993. He is the author of three novels: Breathing Out the Ghost, Dixie Noir, and Raising Aphrodite, as well as nonfiction studies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, and the 1970s. Every day he travels the route outlined in his contribution to this volume while commuting to nearby Troy, Alabama.

Tom Franklin, from Dickinson, Alabama, is the author of Poachers: Stories and three novels, Hell at the Breech, Smonk, and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller, the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Fiction, and the UK’s Gold Dagger Award. His most recent book is The Tilted World, cowritten with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly. Franklin lives in Oxford, Mississippi, and teaches at Ole Miss.

Anita Miller Garner, born in Coosa County, Alabama, is a descendant of Alabama pioneers. She attended Coosa County High School and the University of Alabama and is Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Alabama. Garner is the author of the story collection Undeniable Truths, and fiction editor at Mindbridge Press in Florence, Alabama.

Thom Gossom Jr. was born and raised in Birmingham. He has written a memoir, Walk-On: My Reluctant Journey to Integration at Auburn University; and A Slice of Life, a three-volume collection of short stories. He received his BA from Auburn where he was the first black athlete to graduate from the university. Gossom is also a playwright and working actor, perhaps best known for his recurring roles on Boston Legal and In the Heat of the Night.

Winston Groom, a native of Mobile, graduated from the University of Alabama, served in Vietnam, and worked as a newspaperman. He is the author of eight novels, most famously Forrest Gump, and most recently El Paso. Groom has published twelve books of nonfiction, largely military history. The most recent is The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II. He lives in Point Clear, Alabama.

Anthony Grooms married into a Titusville family more than thirty years ago. Among the oldest black neighborhoods in Birmingham, Titusville has proven to be a rich source of stories for him. It is the setting of his prize-winning novel Bombingham and of several stories in his collection Trouble No More. Like these works, his novel The Vain Conversation explores race, civil rights, and the fight for justice. His story “Selah” appears in Atlanta Noir.

Carolyn Haines was born in Lucedale, Mississippi, and currently lives in Semmes, Alabama. She is a USA Today best-selling author of mysteries and crime fiction. Along with writing full-time, she has been the director of fiction writing at the University of South Alabama. She has published over eighty books and been honored with the Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writing and the Alabama Library Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

Ravi Howard is the author of the novels Like Trees, Walking and Driving the King. He was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award. Howard has received fellowships and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his short fiction has appeared in Salon and Massachusetts Review. He was born in Montgomery in 1974, and he lived in Mobile from 2006 to 2011.

Suzanne Hudson was born in Columbus, Georgia; grew up in Brewton, Alabama; and is a longtime resident of Mobile and Fairhope, Alabama. She is the prize-winning author of two novels and two collections of short stories. Her latest book is The Fall of the Nixon Administration: A Comic Novel. Hudson lives near Fairhope, at Waterhole Branch Productions, with her husband, author Joe Formichella.

Don Noble is the editor of twelve volumes, three of which are collections of short fiction by Alabamians. He has received a regional Emmy Award for achievement in screenwriting and is the recipient of the state prizes for literary scholarship and service to the humanities, as well as the Governor’s Arts Award. Noble is host of the TV literary interview show Bookmark with Don Noble and reviews books weekly for public radio.

Wendy Reed, an Alabama native, is an Emmy Award — winning writer and producer, whose work includes the series Discovering Alabama and Bookmark with Don Noble. An Alabama State Council on the Arts fellow, Reed’s books include An Accidental Memoir: How I Killed Someone and Other Stories, All Out of Faith, and Circling Faith (coedited by Jennifer Horne). Reed teaches in the University of Alabama Honors College and lives in Hoover, Alabama.

Michelle Richmond was born in Demopolis, Alabama, raised in Mobile, and is a graduate of the University of Alabama. She is the author of two prize-winning volumes of stories and five novels, most recently the thriller The Marriage Pact, which has been translated into thirty languages. Richmond is the recipient of the Truman Capote Prize for Distinguished Work in Short Fiction and the Grace Paley Prize.

Daniel Wallace was born in Birmingham in 1959. He is the author of many novels, including Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, which was made into a feature film by Tim Burton, and then a Broadway musical. Wallace’s most recent novel, set in Birmingham, is Extraordinary Adventures. He now resides in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he directs the creative writing program at UNC. Wallace is the 2019 winner of the Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writing.

Brad Watson was born near the Alabama border in Mississippi and moved across the state line in 1978. His work has received honors from the National Book Foundation, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, the Southern Book Critics Circle, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has won the Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writing. He is the author of two volumes of stories and two novels, The Heaven of Mercury, short-listed for the National Book Award, and Miss Jane.